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In the RT on Tuesday, looking over my shoulder to the left of me was a girl reading a book. It was called “Shortcuts to God.”

What stuck out for me was a sentence, “No longer will I choose to let my rational mind and my physical senses determine what is real for me.” (p.78)

That’s messed up. What else are you going to use? Your soul? Good luck.

The irony is that not only am I the fucking king of Spain but I also eat humble pie at the same time.

Someone out there has one (or more) video(s) of me dancing to that song. Working for the City has its moments, as well as shitty wages and treatment — “you don’t get me, I’m part of the union,”* my ass.

* “Part of the Union” by the Strawbs, inspiring union song, if you actually believe that unions are worth their salt in your country.

I don’t want to work away
Doing just what they all say
“Work hard, boy, you’ll find
“One day you’ll have a job like mine”

‘Cause I know, for sure
Nobody should be that poor
Say yes, sink low
Because you happen to say so, say so, you say so

I don’t want to work away
Doing just what they all say
“Work hard, boy, you’ll find
“One day you’ll have a job like mine, job like mine, a job like mine”

“Be wise, look ahead
“Use your eyes,” he said
“Be straight, think right”

But I might die tonight

– Cat Stevens, “But I Might Die Tonight”

Some days it’s like some bastard nailed a ticket for the bus tour down to fucking Hell to the front of my brain. For every wild everything-depends-on-it first-week-of-being-madly-in-love kiss on a streetcorner, for every beautiful woman stopping to feel the sun on her face and every child dancing in clean rain, there’s a kid living in its own shit in a dumpster somewhere while Daddy sells his ass for milk money, tanks breaking down unwanted houses just to stop homeless people squatting there….

– Warren Ellis, as Spider Jerusalem in Transmetropolitan #26

And the very fear that makes you wanna die
Is just the same as what keeps you alive
It’s way more trouble than some suicide is worth.

Won’t it be dull when we rid ourselves of all these demons haunting us
To keep us company?
Won’t it be odd to be happy like we always thought we’re supposed to feel
But never seem to be?

– Barenaked Ladies, “War on Drugs”

Do you ever get the feeling that you’re someone’s experiment? A lab rat — or mouse (is that more dignified?). You might have an elaborate thing set up for you, and you think the whole world’s yours to explore but one day you realize you’re just going in circles — or something. You’re still trapped. You’re just a blank for someone else to fill. And everyone, I mean everyone, has got an opinion. And amid the clutter and the noise, you can’t notice if you ever had one yourself.

“The world needs/ought to have more <blank> like you.”

• people
• guys/men
• doctors
• teachers
• politicians
• Muslims
• professors
• students
• activisits
• lawyers
• artists

And that goes on, and on, till the break of dawn.

Not to say, of course, that the flip side doesn’t exist.

“The world needs/ought to have less <blank> like you.”

• jerks
• pricks
• self-righteous pricks
• arrogant pricks
• assholes

Pick one, or pick a few (so long as they don’t contradict — ah heck, even if they do, lab rat after all). Feel free to add your own.

I don’t know what’s more disturbing: that I can relate to a poorly-written villain from Marvel’s second mainstream universe after Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) thwarts her plans, or that I’m seriously entertaining the thought in the first place.

I don’t think God doesn’t hate. What I’ve learned about God, growing up, is that he has some kind of love-hate thing going on. God loves (more often “has mercy on”) the believers, but severely dislikes the disbelievers. He puts curtains over their hearts and turns them into stone so that they may never see the correct way, and they will burn in hell forever the fuel of which is men and stones. Stuff like that, perfect empathy? I think that’s possible for a human being — one who grafts on another half brain to her own to think faster and tries to destroy the Fantastic Four and X-Men because she has unresolved psychotic issues, yes — but not for the God I learned about growing up. If God was truly perfectly empathetic the concept of hell wouldn’t exist.

I never denied it.

On Monday, July 24, there was a memorial to commemorate Black July, 1983 — where the Sri Lankan government and Sinhalese ethnic nationalists massacred thousands of Tamils in Sri Lanka. The massacres continue to this day, and so this was also a rally of defiance and protest.

And it’s true. Most people largely ignore or are unaware of what’s going on in Sri Lanka.

Click here for more pictures from the memorial/rally.

I was eating a banana and a flashback from when I was a toddler hit me. My mother was “boasting” to my siblings about how I ate a banana all the way to the bottom (there’s this part of the banana at the very bottom that, in normal eating, gets left untouched unless you specifically eat it), and how fantastic that was. I know it made me really proud.

Now I see my mother using similar tactics on my niece (who is three and a half). She “boasts” to me and others about how well she performs something (e.g., drinking milk), in order to encourage her to perpetuate that behaviour. This, of course, is positive social reinforcement.

It was just now that I actually realized and connected the tactics my mother used on me to the ones she’s now using on her granddaughter. Funny how I never really, fully connected that before. I don’t eat bananas all the way down to the very bottom anymore.